The Rocky Mountain News reports that a Colorado "Division of Wildlife biologist believes a nutritional study he conducted with deer, sheep and goats in the late 1960s might have been the genesis of chronic wasting disease. Gene Schoonveld suspects some of the sheep in his study had scrapie, a relative of chronic wasting disease. Some of the deer might have become infected with scrapie, which then mutated into CWD and spread to other deer. ... The state is in the process of killing more than 1,500 wild deer north and east of Fort Collins and more than 1,000 elk infected with CWD on game ranches throughout the state."